press release

Willie wows the crowd and honors fans

By Jason Kane
The Winchester Star

October 30, 2009

Winchester — It’s a rare occasion when a pot-smoking 67-year-old hippie draws a sold-out crowd to Handley High School.

And all it took to get the city’s top brass to give a solid “whoop” and a standing ovation was a little song called “Crazy.”

Yes, Willie Nelson knows how to work Winchester.

Thursday night’s dedication of the Patsy Cline Theatre at Handley found one country music legend paying homage to a friend and fellow country music legend in the best way he knows how: an hour and a half of music.

With little more than a giant Texas flag, a few musicians, and a bare microphone on the stage, Nelson tore through his hits.

“Whiskey River.” “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.” “Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys.”

“Crazy,” which Nelson wrote and Cline recorded two years before dying in a plane crash in 1963, was No. 3 on the playlist.

And 21 more followed.

Those old songs still held as much sway for Thursday night’s crowd as the day Nelson first jotted them down.

A few traveled from Fairfax County, from Maryland, and even from Canada to see Nelson at Handley, but the vast majority of the audience came straight from the northern Shenandoah Valley — as intended.

It was a milestone in the history of the recently renovated high school, and Nelson could feel it.

“The mayor just gave me the key to the city, folks,” he said after sauntering onto the stage. “So everything’s cool.”

The country music rebel flung bandanas, referenced illicit activities, and sang about quite a few of his wild nights on the town.

Audience member Loretta Michael said that’s why she came.

“He’s done all the things normal people have done — drugs, evade taxes,” she said. “He’s an ordinary person’s person.”

And just like any regular person, Nelson had his favorites in the crowd.

Trying out the name “Patsy Cline Theatre” for the first time, Nelson said the fallen country star was “one of the best friends I ever had — and there’s another,” he said, pointing to Charlie Dick, Cline’s husband.

Dick traveled to Winchester from Nashville for the performance and said he can still remember the first time he met Nelson at a bar near Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry.

After shaking hands with the young man, Dick decided to take home his album and play it for Cline.

“I played it half the night, I guess, and Patsy didn’t like it because it kept her up. She said, ‘I never want to hear him again,’” he said.

Cline was equally determined not to embrace the song “Crazy.”

“But we all convinced her it was a good song. I guess she figured we all couldn’t be wrong,” Dick said.

When it became one of her biggest hits, she came to love it.

Nelson continued to write songs that others made famous before he became a music icon in the 1970s. He has released more than 70 albums and had more than 20 No. 1 country hits.

All proceeds from Thursday’s show will benefit the Winchester Education Foundation.

Cody Dearing, an organizer for the event, said the figures will not be released by Ticketmaster for about two weeks.

Regardless of the final totals, the enterprise was a smashing success in the eyes of Jim Farrar. “It’s my goal before death, to meet him in person.”

He hasn’t stopped holding his breath. After all, there’s a lot of space available for naming rights at Handley High School, and Willie Nelson’s tour is far from over.

Five minutes after Nelson’s last song, the band was “on the road again.”

VMDO Architects was founded in 1976 and is the youngest firm to receive the T. David Fitz-Gibbon Virginia Architecture Award, the most prestigious honor given by the Virginia Society of American Institute of Architects.

For further information, interview, and photography opportunities in reference to this project and VMDO Architects, please contact William Bishop at 434.296.5684, email at bishop@vmdo.com.